How to Make Circles on Instagram Story

Adding a simple circle to your Instagram Story is a deceptively powerful design trick that can make your content stand out instantly. It’s a small detail that elevates your brand’s feel, directs your audience's attention, and adds a layer of professional polish to otherwise simple content. This guide will walk you through four distinct methods, from hand-drawn hacks to perfectly polished designs, so you can create eye-catching circles for any situation.

Why Use Circles in Your Instagram Stories?

Before jumping into the how-to, it’s worth understanding why this simple shape is so effective in a vertical, rectangular format. Marketers and designers use circles to subtly guide the viewer’s eye and improve the overall composition of a design. On a busy platform like Instagram, a well-placed circle is your secret weapon to:

• Draw Attention Immediately: A circle acts as a natural frame, making it the perfect tool to highlight a key product, a person's face, a call to action like a link sticker, or a specific part of your text. The eye is naturally drawn to the element enclosed within the shape.
• Create Hierarchy and Focus: Busy photo or video backgrounds can sometimes swallow your message. A circle helps separate an important element from the noise, creating a clear focal point and telling your audience exactly where to look first.
• Establish a Branded Aesthetic: Consistently using circles, especially in your brand colors, helps build a cohesive and recognizable look for your Stories. It differentiates your content and makes it feel more thoughtful and intentional than a standard upload.
• Add a Professional Touch: Clean lines and thoughtful composition make your content look more planned and high-quality. Taking a few extra seconds to add a circle shows your followers that you care about the details, which builds trust and authority.

Method 1: The Easiest Way - Using the Draw Tool

This is the fastest, simplest method for adding a circle to your Story. It's perfect for when you want a more organic, hand-drawn look that screams "in the moment." The imperfect, sketchy vibe adds personality and a human touch that polished graphics sometimes lack. It's authentic and direct.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Open a New Story: Launch the Instagram app, swipe right to your Story camera, and either take a new photo/video or select one from your camera roll.
2. Access the Draw Tool: Once your media is loaded, tap the three-dot menu icon in the upper-right corner of the screen and select "Draw." (On some versions of the app, the Draw pen icon is directly visible in the top toolbar).
3. Choose Your Pen Style: You'll see several pen options at the top. The first standard pen creates a crisp, solid line. The third option, the highlighter, creates a semi-transparent effect which is great for gently overlaying color. The crayon-like textures can also offer a unique, gritty look.
4. Select Your Color: Use the color swatches at the bottom to pick a color. For a custom shade, press and hold any color circle to open the advanced color slider. You can also use the eyedropper tool on the left to perfectly match a color from your photo.
5. Adjust Brush Size: On the left side of the screen, there's a vertical slider. Drag it up or down to change the thickness of your line. A thicker line is more graphic and bold, while a thinner one is more subtle.
6. Draw the Circle: Use your finger or a stylus to draw a circle around the subject. Don’t stress about making it perfect! A wobbly, uneven circle often has more character. If you’re not happy with it, you can always hit the "Undo" arrow at the top left to try again.

When to Use This Method:

This method is ideal for quick, informal call-outs. Think Q&A sessions where you circle the question sticker you're answering, highlighting a funny detail in a friend's photo, or quickly pointing to a product on a shelf in a "behind-the-scenes" video.

Method 2: Creating a Perfect, Opaque Circle - The Text Hack

Sometimes you need a perfectly formed, solid-colored circle, not a hand-drawn one. While Instagram doesn't have a dedicated shape tool for this, a clever workaround using the text tool gets the job done beautifully. This is the secret that many pro accounts use to create clean, graphic layouts.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Start Your Story and Open the Text Tool: Prepare your Story with your background image or video, then tap the "Aa" icon to add text.
2. Type a Period: Yes, really. Just type a single period "." on your keyboard.
3. Add a Background Highlight: At the very top left of the screen, tap the first icon which looks like an "A" with stars. Tapping it once adds a semi-transparent background. Tap it again to create an opaque, solid-colored background. You should now see a small, solid-colored square containing your period.
4. Pick Your Color: Tap the color wheel icon at the top to select your desired color for the shape.
5. Make it HUGE: Use two fingers to pinch and zoom outwards on the square. As you expand it, it will get much larger. Don’t worry about the corners for now.
6. The Final Trick - Change the Font: This is where the magic happens. While your boxed period is selected, tap through the different font styles available at the bottom of the screen. As you swipe through them, you’ll notice that some of the fonts with rounder characters (like Courier Bold or some of the script fonts) will automatically transform your solid square into a perfect circle.
7. Resize and Position: Once it's a circle, you can continue to resize it and drag it into the perfect position on your Story. Since it's technically a text element, you can move it around freely.

You can use this to create solid-colored dots or oversized circles as a background element to place text or stickers on top of.

Method 3: Layering with Photo Circles

This is arguably the most useful and professional-looking technique. It involves layering different elements, including your own images from your camera roll, to create layouts that look like they were made in a dedicated design app. The key is in using the "Add from Camera Roll" sticker, which has a hidden shape feature.

Part 1: Turning Any Photo into a Circle Sticker

1. Open the Sticker Tray: After setting your Story background, tap the sticker icon at the top of the screen (the square smiley face).
2. Find the "Add from Camera Roll" Sticker: Scroll down a bit and look for the sticker icon that shows a preview of your most recent photo, inside a circle with a small plus sign. Tap it.
3. Choose Your Image: Your photo gallery will open. Select the photo you want to feature - this could be a headshot, a logo, a product shot, anything.
4. Cycle Through the Shapes: By default, the image will appear in its original shape (usually a square or rectangle). Now, simply tap on the image. Instagram will automatically cycle the image through different shape masks: rectangle with rounded corners, circle, star, heart. Keep tapping until it’s a perfect circle!

Part 2: Creating a Bordered Photo Circle

Now, let's combine Method #2 and the photo circle to create a clean, bordered design that makes your image pop.

1. First, use the "Text Hack" from Method 2 to create a large, perfectly solid-colored circle. Choose a color that complements your photo and brand - like a bold accent color or a simple white.
2. Next, use the photo-sticker trick above (Part 1) to create your circular image.
3. Resize and position your photo circle so that it fits right inside the solid-colored circle. Make the background circle slightly larger than the photo, creating a clean, even border all the way around.

This elegant, layered effect is fantastic for introducing team members, showcasing customer testimonials (with their photo), or featuring new products against a branded background color.

Method 4: Using GIFs for Animated Circles

If you want to grab your audience's attention with movement, animated GIF stickers are the way to go. These dynamic circles can blink, rotate, pulse, or spin, instantly adding energy to your Story and focusing the viewer's eye exactly where you want it.

How to Find and Use Them:

1. Open the GIF Library: Tap the sticker icon on your Story and select the "GIF" option.
2. Search for Circle Designs: The GIPHY search bar is your creative playground. Try searching for these terms:
   • "Circle" (for general options)
   • "White circle" or "black circle" (for simple, bold rings)
   • "Spinning circle"
   • "Pulsing circle"
   • "Geometric" (often returns clean-lined shapes)
   • "Line circle"
3. Choose and Place: Scroll through the results until you find one that fits your aesthetic. Tap it to add it to your Story, then use your fingers to resize, rotate, and place it perfectly over the text, object, or link sticker you're trying to highlight.

Pro Tip: The motion of an animated GIF is one of the strongest visual cues you can use. Use it strategically to guide your audience to take an action, like "Tap Here" or swiping up on a link.

Final Thoughts

Mastering the art of creating circles in Instagram Stories unlocks a new level of creativity and professionalism for your content. From the quick imperfection of the draw tool to the polished layers of photo stickers and clean text hacks, these methods transform a simple shape into a powerful tool for branding, focus, and visual appeal.

Once you’ve perfected your story designs and templates, keeping a consistent creation and posting schedule is how you build real momentum. For a long time, we struggled with this part, often finding social media tools were built for an older era of the internet and made working with modern formats like Stories feel clunky. That’s why we created Postbase - to offer a clean, reliable way to manage and schedule the content that actually drives engagement today. With our visual calendar, you can plan out your beautifully designed Stories, Reels, and videos ahead of time, ensuring you post consistently without a last-minute scramble.